the exact date of the migration of the village to its present site, it must have occurred in time to create the medieval field system. Butterworth argues that the most likely date would have been around 1340 to coincide with the construction of Howgill castle, although he accepts that an earlier date, prompted by raids into England by De Bruys in 1311 would also be possible. He points out that once the Lancasters became Lords of the Manor soon after 1335, they had a direct vested interest in protecting both their tenants and their tenants livestock, so that the laying out of a defensible village and the building of Howgill Castle might have gone hand in hand Assuming, for the sake of romance at least, that the development was indeed planned, Butterworth considers whether the modern arrangement of houses and farms round the central green took shape as a single act of concerted construction or, as would seem more likely, took place in a staged, "organic" fashion. It is his belief that the original village consisted of a single line of cottages (presumably cruck-framed, thatched with turf or heather and with walls of wattle and daub, clay or roughly-piled field stones) along the south-east side of the green and fronting onto the back lane that runs alongside this side of the village. This theory of course reverses the current orientation of the houses on this side, but Butterworth sees no problem here. Under his theory, the green would then have taken the form of an enclosure behind these properties and he suggests that further properties would then have spread around this enclosure. Re-orientation of properties to accord with the current layout would have taken place as houses were gradually improved and replaced and it was found convenient to regard the green as the centre of the village. In support of his view he point out that access to farm buildings on the south east side has always been from the back lane, whereas on the north west side the gaps between houses have always been much larger, so enabling access to the farmyards to be made from the green. There has never been a back lane on the north west side, although there are vestiges of such lanes on the north east and south west. The modern "front gardens" of properties round the green were enclosed gradually over a number